Stories

While on the road and back home, I frequently meet people who confuse independent travel with vacation. That it, when I describe a few months-long trip across Asia, what comes to mind is some sort of luxurious tour guided through the gems of the continent. The reality, though, is not like that for someone with a backpack and figuring it out for themselves as cheaply as possible (unless you consider riding across the border of China and Mongolia crammed in the trunk of a car with 12 other passengers “luxurious”).

In any case, I originally wrote this for other travelers who were trying to figure out ways to get across the border from Beijing to the capital of Mongolia, Ulaanbataar, for relatively cheap, but I think it is also an illustrative glimpse of the day-to-day logistics that a traveler has to figure out and that I don’t really write about on my site (it is boring).